CIA chief John Brennan to face down pressure over torture report

[Len Cnut]

And it weren't a compound, its just a normal house like most of the houses of the middle classes in Pakistan.

They typically have 18 foot concrete walls topped with barbed wire, security gates and a 7 foot wall on a balcony?

Surrounding the perimeter, for the middle classes, yes. Big iron gates too and extremely vicious guard dogs. They are often built by people from England cuz English money goes a long way over there.

7 foot wall on a balcony sounds odd though. People dont really live indoors there as such, most of the living activity, eating, sleeping etc is done out in the open, hence the requirement for the perimeter wall.

Edited December 12, 2014 by Lennie Godber

[Rustycage]

Oh, I'm 100% with you on that. What I'm saying is it's kind of like the death penalty. IMO these are moral issues, but once we let the other side turn it into an issue of pragmatism, we've lost our moral standing and failed to differentiate ourselves from the torturers in principle.

Even the drone strikes fall into this discussion. It's certainly not a R vs D issue. This CIA chief, even though he wasn't in charge of the torture program but was still a high ranking official during the era, was appointed by Obama and is STILL being praised by him. Both sides are completely full of shit and in should no way be representing us or doing active service. Also, after the spending bill passed through the house last night, it's absolutely clear that both sides are completely out of control in every aspect but that's another topic.

At the very least, I hope we can finally have some accountability over the CIA. As of right now, they are just as much a threat to our security as any enemy.

After 9/11, they judged the people very well. The fear mongering really took hold and even to this day, some of the people can't reason over the legality of torture without appealing to emotion and fear. Once we go that far, we're no different than the people we claim to despise.

[Rustycage]

And it weren't a compound, its just a normal house like most of the houses of the middle classes in Pakistan.

They typically have 18 foot concrete walls topped with barbed wire, security gates and a 7 foot wall on a balcony?

Surrounding the perimeter, for the middle classes, yes. Big iron gates too and extremely vicious guard dogs. They are often built by people from England cuz English money goes a long way over there.

7 foot wall on a balcony sounds odd though. People dont really live indoors there as such, most of the living activity, eating, sleeping etc is done out in the open, hence the requirement for the perimeter wall.

The walls were reported to be unusually high for the neighborhood, though. No internet or phone wires also seems a little odd but I know some people of that region can be rather minimalist. Anyways, calling it a compound isn't really a stretch. For that neighborhood, maybe not but anywhere else, yeah, that's rather strange.

[magisme]

26 of the 119 detainees were wrongfully held. That's not bad, right?

[downzy]

From my favourite columnist at the Globe and Mail:

From secrecy to transparency and back again

DOUG SAUNDERS

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/from-secrecy-to-transparency-and-back-again/article22070725/

Which revelation from Washington has shocked the world more?

That the Central Intelligence Agency has run, for more than a decade, a secret network of de facto dungeons where sometimes lethal torture, rape and atrocities have systematically been used against more than 100 people, with no useful intelligence results, under broad presidential authorization?

Or that the world now knows this, in extraordinary and impeccably documented detail, because a different branch of the U.S. federal administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee, released to the public 525 pages of a 6,000-page report, composed entirely of the CIA’s own internal self-documentation, resulting from a five-year investigative effort that the agency spent almost $40-million resisting but that got its documents with full political freedom?

One thing you could say about the United States: No other country’s government is able to self-critically document its own abuses and excesses with such regular alacrity, transparency and totality.

This sort of exposure, even with executive approval, would be almost unimaginable in, say, Canada. We know this, because our own torture scandal, involving the handover of scores of Afghan detainees by the Canadian military and other NATO forces to local authorities for alleged torture, has never been fully investigated. In fact, Ottawa has worked hard to keep its documentation secret, and most of what we know about it comes from a British High Court of Justice trial in 2010. If such abuses were committed by our intelligence agencies, they would be unlikely to see the light of day, given the dysfunctional nature of our civilian oversight system and the powerlessness of parliamentary committees.

The world, in this view, should be inspired by the U.S. democratic penchant for self-inculpating scrutiny.

But of course, there is another thing you could say about the Americans: Few major democracies have such a spotty record of military and intelligence agencies falling into extended periods of anti-democratic excess and abuse, from the CIA’s international misadventures in the first decades of the Cold War to the My Lai-type excesses of the Vietnam War to the targeting of American dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s to the multiagency derelictions of moral principle during the war on terror. Each of these moments has provoked a congressional committee investigation, then a period of reform and transparency, until the next international crisis erupts and the rules get tossed overboard.

Too many journalists and historians tend to look at modern U.S. history either as a continuous and undifferentiated string of CIA and Pentagon atrocities and excesses, or as a set of institutional and democratic triumphs.

In fact, both secret excess and revelatory transparency are part of the same system, which pits Washington’s institutions against one another in a teeter-totter of competitive animosity unlike any other country’s. Even former vice-president Dick Cheney, who largely dreamed up the torture regime, viewed the CIA with deep distrust, believing it to be a dangerously liberal organization.

This system dates back to the creation of the secret branches of the U.S. administration – 13 agencies, including the CIA and the FBI – in 1947, without any oversight. Their vast abuses of power led to the 1975 Church Committee, which exposed the Cold War abuses and led to laws restricting secret activities and establishing congressional oversight committees. These committees have powers unknown in most other countries, but tend to support and defend the agencies until the cycle of reform and abuse once again turns dark.

If the world is to learn anything from this, it is the key discovery made by these unique committees: Most of the activities carried out by the secret agencies they monitor (and by sibling agencies in every country) are pointless and ineffective. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Intelligence Committee report proved beyond doubt that 13 years of torture produced not a single piece of actionable intelligence. Earlier reports have shown that targeted-assassination programs (aimed, for example, at Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein) have completely failed; that engineered coups always backfire (Iran, Chile and Congo all saw unsavoury but democratic leaders overthrown with CIA help, leading to even worse regimes coming to power); that the mass surveillance of religious and ethnic communities fails to produce any useful information; that the use of sting operations increases, rather than reduces, terrorism.

In its decades-long cycle of secrecy and transparency, the very least Washington has taught us is this: Don’t bother doing what their spies have done, for it leads to nothing but misery.

[T.wa.T]

26 of the 119 detainees were wrongfully held. That's not bad, right?

Im guessing they were in the wrong place at the wrong time???

[Amir]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html

26 of the 119 detainees were wrongfully held. That's not bad, right?

Im guessing they were in the wrong place at the wrong time???

"Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was mistaken for someone with the same name, grabbed in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan, where he spent four months in the C.I.A. jail known as the Salt Pit."

Fucking Macedonia, the widely known Muslim terrorist hotspot

[Rustycage]

Scalia Defends CIA Tactics After Torture Report

The conservative Supreme Court justice says sometimes it might be necessary

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a new interview that the use of harsh interrogation techniques now widely condemned as torture might not be unconstitutional.

The 78-year-old jurist, part of the court’s conservative wing, said the there’s nothing in the constitution that prohibits harsh treatment of terror suspects.

His remarks came during an interview with a Swiss radio station that aired Thursday, the Associated Press reports. They followed the release of a Senate report the faulted the CIA for lying to the Bush White House and to Congress about the methods and their effectiveness.

MORE: What the torture report reveals about Zero Dark Thirty

Scalia pointed to the oft-cited “ticking time bomb” argument, saying it would be difficult to rule out the use of torture to get information from terror suspects if millions of lives were at stake, and said he doesn’t “think it’s so clear at all” that such tactics should be prohibited in all cases.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Weighing constitutionality while it clearly violates international law? wut?

People keep referring to "the ticking time bomb approach" but with one of the very first suspects, they isolated him for 47 days before questioning him. Again....wut? If you're operating in that context, you aren't waiting for a month and a half to question someone. I know people like the show 24 and etc but at what point did people start making decisions based on shit they see on tv? (rhetorical)

The EIT's resulted in NO prevented attacks, no captured suspects and no lives saved. It was of zero value and is illegal. There's no reason to defend it other than to protect the agency.

[OmarBradley]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/cia-admits-role-in-1985-coup-to-oust-david-lee-rot,37570/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:1:Default

This scandal runs back 3 decades.

Edited December 13, 2014 by OmarBradley

[Roush]

One thing you could say about the United States: No other country’s government is able to self-critically document its own abuses and excesses with such regular alacrity, transparency and totality.

[T.wa.T]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html

26 of the 119 detainees were wrongfully held. That's not bad, right?

Im guessing they were in the wrong place at the wrong time???

"Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was mistaken for someone with the same name, grabbed in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan, where he spent four months in the C.I.A. jail known as the Salt Pit."

Fucking Macedonia, the widely known Muslim terrorist hotspot

Haha, attack of the clones??

[Dr. Who]

I honestly don't agree with torture. I don't know that it should be used even if it was the most effective form of intelligence gathering in the world.

And reading this report, I hope some people end up in jail. You don't treat human beings like animals. Even if they deserve it.

[Lio]

Just read this column in The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/15/media-dick-cheney-torture-architects

It's really shocking to me. Seriously?

Beyond saying he’d do it all over again, the former vice-president was asked about the almost 25% of the detainees in the CIA torture program who were later declared innocent. He has no remorse. Cheney said:

I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States. I was prepared and we did.

Hayden, the loquacious and increasingly outrageous former CIA director, appeared on ABC’s This Week around the same time as Cheney, and while his answers may have been delivered with a smile rather than a scowl, his words were just as infuriating. “They were successful. That’s historical fact,” Hayden said of the CIA’s torture sessions, ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary produced by the Senate.

In a rare interview in which someone actually challenged him, Hayden repeatedly defended anal rape on national television on Friday, to an incredulous and baffled Jake Tapper of CNN. Seriously: Hayden kept claiming that “rectal rehydration” – one of the CIA’s most horrifying torture techniques – was a “medical procedure.”

[magisme]

A truly horrific poll of the American people:

Majority says CIA harsh interrogations justified

http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/12/16/National-Politics/Polling/release_376.xml

[Lio]

Well, then it would seem US media have done a good job in brainwashing the Americans. Or have they always been that way? I think I read somewhere there was a similar poll a couple of years ago where much more were opposed to torture.

[magisme]

We're opposed to torture until we're shown that we do it. Then we support it. Because if we do it it must be awesome.

[downzy]

Interesting to see who exactly supports the use of torture in the U.S.

Funny, you'd think the more religious one is the less likely you'd expect them to support such tactics. Turns out the opposite to be true:

[dalsh327]

I think Hilary Clinton was going to pull aid to Pakistan if they weren't cooperative with handing over Bin Laden, and it's going to turn out the Bush administration knew where he was.

Gitmo bay was more about trying to find terrorist cells but without any "wins", taking cells down, and just keeping a lot of people detained and getting around the Geneva Convention & POW rules, it was a failure, just like how they handled the guy selling loose cigarettes was an epic fail for NYC. Brutality in blue or in cammies has to be answered for. There was more head games than physical being played on the prisoners.

Hopefully people who were involved in the tactics that regret what they did and what they were ordered to do, will talk about it. We've already seen some that have been interviewed and have talked.

[AxlisOld]

Interesting to see who exactly supports the use of torture in the U.S.

Funny, you'd think the more religious one is the less likely you'd expect them to support such tactics. Turns out the opposite to be true:

Yea, but those being tortured worshipped the wrong god, that learn em not to love Jesus.